656delta

In my first installment of Odyssey suspension drama we dealt with the crappy ball-joints with the candy-*** snap-rings. Today we will address the route cause of what actually caused the ball-joints to come out in the first place. What most Odyssey owners [who like to slam them on the ground] don't realize is that their soccer-mom-mobile doesn't have as much suspension travel as the Accord that it gets its front end from. Slam an Odyssey 2 or 3 inches, drive it up on to an alignment rack and lift it up, and look up into the fender-well while the suspension is compressed. You'll see that the upper control-arm is not only rubbing on the unibody of the van, but also has only about an inch of travel left before it smacks into the top of the shock-tower. When that happens the sudden stop at the end is what causes the ball-joint to pop the snap-ring off and come out of the control-arm. Fear not, my children, for there is a salution to our problem. Here's what you're going to start with:

This is the top of the shock-tower. Note that there's a "bubble" of sheet-metal that protrudes through the second layer of steal that makes up the unibody. This is where the upper control-arn actually contacts the unibody, and this is what you're going to remove. You will need a chisel to scrape the glue off of the seems. It is the same on both sides of the car.





You'll need several hand-tools, such as a round rat-tail file, a flat rat-tail file with one rounded side, a power-drill or a dremel tool with lots of cutting wheels, and at least two boxes of cuss-words. After removing material for what seemed like an eternity this is what I ended up with.



This not only gives you the extra suspension clearence that you need for your low-ridin' dad-mobile, but it also gives you the option to adjust camber angles on those Ingalls ball-joints we installed in part one, without having to jack the car up and set it down repeatedly durring corrections. Here's the finished product. I coated the cut-outs with a little white Krylon paint, to keep it from rusting until I can get it painted with the proper automotive enamel.





Notice how I made a small relief-cut just to the inner side of the hole. This will allow your alignment tech enough clearence to place the socket on the ball-joint without any hassles. Remember; the easier you make his life the easier he will be on your wallet. Trust me on this one. I used to be an alignment tech, and gotta tell you that there's nothing more frustrating than finding out that the camber is still out of spec, having to jack the car up on the rack again, make a best-guess adjustment, and set it back down only to have the computerized alignment machine tell you that it's still out of spec. When the tech can adjust the camber with the car sitting on its wheels and watch the computer give him feed-back on the fly, he can do it more accurately, not to mention a heck of a lot faster. Be kind to your tires and your alignment technition. You will both benefit in the long run. Now take your butt back outside and sweep up all the metal shavings you left from doing this modification!

0S2Carbonworks

Wow, very helpful. This needs to be a sticky thread.

656delta

That would be cool, but I would run out of cool info for everyone, and then they would get bored with it. Gotta have lots of little threads on different stuff. I'll be experementing with making an adjustable rear camber set-up as soon as I can get my resources together. Once I pull it off I'll make a thread with all the low-down.

0S2Carbonworks

That is my only issue now. Seems no one has solved this unless you want to take the car to a low rider shop and have them weld in new arms...